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Levantine Phoenicians made little genetic contribution to Punic settlements in the central and western Mediterranean between the sixth and second centuries bce; instead, the Punic people derived most of their ancestry from a genetic profile similar to that of Sicily and the Aegean, with notable contributions from North Africa as well.

It has been proposed that the amygdala is required for the familiarity aspect of item recognition. By studying the performance of monkeys with selective amygdala lesions on four converging memory paradigms, the authors demonstrate that the amygdala is not necessary for familiarity memory, but confirm its role in reward processing.

Nature benefits people in diverse ways, but insight on the relative value of conserving or restoring versus using intensively is limited. Synthesizing data from 62 sites worldwide, this study finds benefits from conservation and restoration often outweighing private ones and that these rise with the social cost of carbon.

Neural coding of goal direction remains unclear in insects. Here, the authors describe goal-direction neurons in the monarch butterfly brain that specifically encode the insect’s desired flight direction during spatial orientation.

From 1980 to 2018, the levels of total and non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol increased in low- and middle-income countries, especially in east and southeast Asia, and decreased in high-income western countries, especially those in northwestern Europe, and in central and eastern Europe.

The MICrONS mouse visual cortex dataset shows that neurons with similar response properties preferentially connect, a pattern that emerges within and across brain areas and layers, and independently emerges in artificial neural networks where these ‘like-to-like’ connections prove important for task performance.

The authors combine fossil occurrence data, phylogenies and climatic niche modelling to explore the palaeobiogeography of early pterosaurs and their non-flying close relatives, the lagerpetids.

Current anti-venoms against black mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) bites are animal-derived and associated with several limitations. Here, Laustsen and colleagues develop an experimental recombinant anti-venom based on oligoclonal human IgG antibodies and establish its potential protective value in neutralizing dendrotoxin-mediated neurotoxicity using venom challenge in vivo models.

Tree mortality is increasing due to droughts and other climate change-related stressors, but isolating climate signals for tree mortality is challenging. Here, the authors assemble a geo-referenced global database that quantifies how drought and hotter climate drive tree mortality events.

Current and future climate change is expected to impact human health, both indirectly and directly, through increasing temperatures. Climate change has already had an impact and is responsible for 37% of warm-season heat-related deaths between 1991 and 2018, with increases in mortality observed globally.

Here, the authors perform a whole-genome sequencing association analysis of genetic variants in ≤11,840 multi-ethnic participants with ≤1666 circulating metabolites, discovering 1985 novel variant-metabolite associations and insights into human disease.

Excitatory neurons in the neocortex exhibit considerable morphological diversity, yet their organizational principles remain a subject of ongoing research. Here, the authors use unsupervised learning to show that most excitatory neuron morphologies in the mouse visual cortex form a continuum, with notable exceptions in deeper layers.

The permeability of a dome exerts a control on the outgassing efficiency of the underlying magma. The authors investigate the role of hydrothermal alteration on this process in the laboratory and use these data to model whether the overpressures generated are capable of promoting explosive behaviour.

Silva-Santos and colleagues provide in vivo preclinical evidence supporting a therapeutic use of Delta One T cells to tackle colorectal cancer and propose activating natural killer cell receptor NKG2D and blocking immune checkpoint receptors as possible combination therapies.

Three electron microscopy datasets are combined to provide a complete connectomic description of the neural circuitry that makes up the neck connective in Drosophila, including the descending neurons, ascending neurons and sensory ascending neurons.

The ATLAS Collaboration reports a measurement of the ratio of the decay rates of W bosons to τ leptons and muons, in agreement with universal lepton couplings as postulated in the standard model of particle physics.

Navigation relies on detecting left versus right body asymmetries for gaze and course stability. A central three-layer optic flow-sensitive network with competitive lateral disinhibition extracts asymmetries from complex motion patterns.

The ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider reports a search for charged-lepton-flavour violation in decays of Z bosons into a τ lepton and an electron or muon of opposite charge.

Dense calcium imaging combined with co-registered high-resolution electron microscopy reconstruction of the brain of the same mouse provide a functional connectomics map of tens of thousands of neurons of a region of the primary cortex and higher visual areas.

Analysis of ground-sourced and satellite-derived models reveals a global forest carbon potential of 226 Gt outside agricultural and urban lands, with a difference of only 12% across these modelling approaches.

The surface topography of breast implants mediates the immune responses to them, and implants with an average roughness of 4 μm largely suppress foreign body response and fibrosis.

Subduction erosion transports crustal material from the upper plate at subduction zones into the mantle and, thus, likely contributes to the composition of arc magmas. This Review discusses the evidence for subduction erosion globally and outlines how a contribution of tectonically eroded crust can be identified in arc magmas.

The risk of heat-mortality is increasing sharply. The authors report that heat-mortality levels of a 1-in-100-year summer in the climate of 2000 can be expected once every ten to twenty years in the current climate and at least once in five years with 2 °C of global warming.

Red List information is used to generate global maps of the likelihood of impacts on terrestrial vertebrates exerted by agriculture, hunting and trapping, logging, pollution, invasive species and climate change.

Using cryo-electron microscopy, the structures of mammalian fatty acid synthase reveal how the acyl carrier protein dynamically shuttles intermediates between selected active sites.

A rare variant burden analytical framework for Mendelian diseases was developed and applied to data from the 100,000 Genomes Project, identifying 69 probable new disease–gene associations.

A widely accepted assumption in addiction research is that overvaluation of drug cues is caused by enhanced dopaminergic response to these cues. Here, the authors show similar dopamine neuronal responses to cues predicting opioids vs. natural rewards.

Alternative stable states in forests have implications for the biosphere. Here, the authors combine forest biodiversity observations and simulations revealing that leaf types across temperate regions of the NH follow a bimodal distribution suggesting signatures of alternative forest states.

New estimates of life expectancy at birth and at age 65 years in Brazil reveal substantial declines as a result of COVID-19, bringing mortality back to levels observed 20 or more years ago.

Most Amazon tree species are rare but a small proportion are common across the region. The authors show that different species are hyperdominant in different size classes and that hyperdominance is more phylogenetically restricted for larger canopy trees than for smaller understory ones.

Microbes and viruses inhabit the subseafloor crust beneath hydrothermal vents. Here the authors show that vent endemic animals such as giant tubeworms also live in vent subseafloor cavities, implicating subseafloor dispersal of vent larvae and the need to protect seafloor and subseafloor vent habitats.

Using a conceptual framework known as the integrative hypothesis of specialization, the authors suggest that phylogenetic constraints separate species into different layers and shape the modules of a Neotropical network composed of the frugivorous and nectarivorous interactions between bats and plants.